It Isn’t What You Think
Good Friday Scripture Readings
Five years ago this week, I finished the first of my annual Lenten lecture series. The topic was on sin and evil. In that series, I explained how often we look at the world and see evil where none exists because we either fail to realize what creation really is or we forget about it. Without that understanding, today’s events make no sense. How many people, if they gather to consider the Good Friday experience at all, find it senseless at best and, at the worst, blasphemous because they see it as God taking out the punishment we are owed because of sin on his innocent Son. In this case, a lack of understanding leads to a distortion of what God has done, rendering it incomprehensible.
For God, creation is not something positive. Creation introduces a negativity into being. Suddenly, there is not simply “I am who am,” but there is God and not-God. We live and move and have our being in that not-God. As much as God is infinite—that literally means without limitations—we exist in a universe bounded by limitations of all sorts. Without those limitations, we could not exist, yet here we are. They are limitations of space and time, limitations of experience and knowledge, limitations of will and strength. Although Jesus’s experiences of betrayal, injustice, hatred, slander, abuse, torture, and death may border on the extreme, they only differ in extent and severity rather than in kind from what people experience every day.
We’re tempted to think of Jesus as a victim because we understand that there was no reason he should have suffered as he did. But that’s not the person John shows us in the gospel. What we see, on the contrary, is a man who in himself is the imago Dei—the very image of God himself—willingly embracing all the limitations of our human condition even unto death, death on a cross. From the earliest moments of the Christian Church, people have been applying the text of Isaiah 53:5 to Jesus:
But he was pierced for our offenses, crushed for our sins; upon him was the chastisement that makes us whole, by his stripes we were healed.
Yet, his crucifixion was neither a punishment nor retribution from God, but a lesson to be learned. And what was this lesson? That regardless of the difficulty, tragedy, or injustice, no matter what we must endure as human beings in this life, God goes through it with us. God is not indifferent or impassive, but when we hurt, God hurts, and unbelievably, God even passes through the gates of death with us. And this is not some tale from the far-distant past. Anamnesis tells us that we’re present to it happening here and now. “For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall also be with him in his resurrection.” [Rom 6:5] All that is necessary is trust—the same trust Jesus had when he looked back at all he had taught and all that he had shown the world about the Father’s love as he said, “It is finished.”
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